Community Tip - An X-Form Trick

With the support of iLok, more tips & tricks from the community. Here is one from Justin Walker….

If you use X-Form a lot then you know it’s advantages and disadvantages. It sounds great but it takes a lot of time to process. If you use the plugin version or as an algorithm with your TCE tool, then you are stuck waiting for it to render in the foreground. As an algorithm on an elastic audio track it will process in the background, but you have to render with each stretch before you can preview it.

What I do to get around this is setup two elastic audio “work” tracks, the first one can be set to any of the real-time algorithms (I always set it to Polyphonic), and the second track is set to the X-Form algorithm. Do your time stretching and compressing first on the real-time track. This always you to quickly make changes and easily preview your work. When you are finished, drag it down to the X-Form elastic track. The audio will immediately begin to render with X-Form in the background, allowing you to continue your work without being forced to wait several minutes, especially with those really long clips.

I do this for almost every music cue when working on reality shows; where picture editors commonly force music edits to match what’s going on in the picture, but sacrifice musical integrity with poorly timed edits.

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